Saturday, July 03, 2010

Firefox 4.0b2 – “Official” x64 Bit Edition Available

…for the brave and daring only! These are not necessarily “stable” things by any means. You’ve been warned.

OK…first things first…x64 bit versions of Firefox have been kicking around in the wings for many, many years. However none of them have been “mainstream” or really official builds. Just quiet labors of love.

I’ve been running the latest stable builds of Firefox 3.6.6/7 now with no issues on my x64 Windows 7 system. And though I’ve had a long history here at this blog of playing with the Minefield/beta versions, I’ve really been relying on the stability and compatibility with add-ons that the stable builds provide.

That said, I still keep some portable versions of the Minefield/Nightlies around just for piddling.

I was recently reading this post, A Look At Firefox 3.7a6pre (Minefield) over at The Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog and was impressed enough by the well-organized list of items detailed by the Guru in 3.7 that I decided to go ahead and update my playbox builds.

no matter how many tabs are open, they are still hosted in a single process, unlike Chromium and IE8. Opera and Safari also still seem to be using a single process to host multiple tabs/pages.

Memory usage seems fairly low…although I wasn’t using it with any additional extensions.

It seemed stable…but sometimes it temporarily “stalled” when dragging it around the desktop.

Just because it is x64 doesn’t necessarily mean it is any “faster” than the x32 bit versions.

No x64 bit Flash player…yet.

I’m not aware of many x64-bit add-ons. Not sure how x32 bit add-ons will impact x64 bit Firefox.

Depending on your system, you may need to also install the Visual Studio Runtimes for x64 which you can grab here. ( I did not as my system was already prepped with them from some previous application download/configuration.)

All that said…it is very cool to see this “official” x64 bit version of Firefox kicking around and I will be playing with this one as much as I do the Google Chromium Nightlies (which I like very much despite the lack of a bookmark sidebar…).

This has been covered before, but just in case you don’t want to skip around, here is how you can build your own “portable” version of a x64 Firefox nightly build for your Windows system. I really prefer using these versions so I can run them along-side my current “stable” build with no ill effects or getting the add-ons all mucked up together.

Run the executable, and select a location to “extract” the files to a "FirefoxPortableNightly" folder location. I used my system Desktop, but you pick wherever you wish.

You will likely get a “The installer was unable to download Current Minefield Trunk Build…” error dialog box. That’s great. (Really!). Tell the error box “OK” and keep going. All we needed was the launcher and portable folder structure extracted for us. And that should have been accomplished before the error.

Download the latest nightly (Minefield) trunk release. Look at the bottom of the list for the latest firefox-4.0(something).en-US.win64-x86_64.zip file version! (Note the (something) name will change as new builds come out.)

Extract this file somewhere on your system.

Go to that extracted folder location and inside find the “Firefox” folder/contents.

Copy that "firefox" folder and contents.

Now browse to the the \FirefoxPortableNightly\App\ subfolder created in step #2 above.

Paste the folder you copied in step #7 over the “Firefox” folder found in step #8. It is OK to overwrite/replace anything it might find in the process.

Run the FirefoxPortable.exe file in the FirefoxPortableNightly folder and away you go!

As previously noted, you might also find you need to install the Visual Studio Runtimes for x64 which you can grab here.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

In regards to multiple processes, only plugins run as their own process and it is just one process for the all the plugins. That stared with 3.6.4/3.6.6 releases last week. Not sure if 3.7a6/4.0b builds are doing that as well. I have never tried 64-bit, of course come to think of it I think I am only running the 32-bit version of Winders Vista even though I do have a 64-bit machine.

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